Dont under estimate the power of branding/positioning/marketing. For more than a year I have been using a RL'd Qwen fine tune optimised for just taking a decision and outputting the decision number, initially I didnt have much training data so after a few manual examples I asked deepseek to make them for me and had codex train it. I compared it to jev when it first came out and it was mostly neck and neck for my use case. I can't have been the only one in fact, I'm sure there must have been other people who probably even open sourced, but I couldn't find anything. I think the question going forward will be how does one keep abreast of interesting stuff happening, now that its de-coupled from direct human labour so de-bottlenecked on production capacity - just bound by how residual time/attention one has (Terence Tao was talking about this exact predicament in the latest tyler cowen podcast).

The natural path of things, I suppose, is those that have a soapbox/distribution will just get larger...